


Choice

by pyrrhical (anoyo)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Drabble, M/M, Pre-Movies, Prompt Fic, The History of James T. Kirk, Timeline, Who's surprised?, but not happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-05-04
Packaged: 2018-10-28 02:14:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10821642
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anoyo/pseuds/pyrrhical
Summary: Choice: Jim only ever had one.





	Choice

**Author's Note:**

> Rescued from my email, written as a prompt response. Originally written 4/13/12.
> 
> My original notes after writing it: 
> 
> And actually, I want to rewrite that with each section in narrative format and with a hell of a lot more on the end BUT I AM AT WORK and I wanted to get that OUT while it was in my head and OMFG. And halfway through it wanted to be in present tense and WTF, seriously. So. If you see this longer and in narrative and later, KNOW THAT YOU DID THAT. To me. I blame you. Or something. BUT THAT PROMPT ATE MY SOUL.

When it comes right down to it, Jim Kirk has never really had a lot of choice in his life. Or maybe -- maybe -- he's never really been able to make many choices in his life. His life, for one reason, or for many reasons, has stood in the way of itself.

He was born in the middle of a firefight, the primordial parts of his brain the only areas every really able to even register the sound of his father's voice, and a little piece of his mother's soul breaking off simultaneously with the words James Tiberius Kirk being written into his birth registry. Jim never chose to be born the thing that broke his mother, whether or not his mother ever really accepted that. He never chose it, but it did happen.

When he was seven, he could count the number of times he'd seen his mother more than just overnight on his two hands, and so she handed him a stepfather in what Sam told him was a consolation prize. As in, "Sorry, kids! You can't have a dad, you can't have a mom, have a Frank, instead!" It wasn't like Jim had a choice in the matter -- seven-year-olds, no matter how brilliant they were, couldn't really dispute when their mothers got married. Nor, Sam told him, could eleven-year-olds.

Frank being the biggest ass in the world, no one could control but Frank. Jim tried -- he really tried, tried everything he knew -- but not even topping every chart Southeast Iowa offered could mitigate whatever it was that made Frank the way he was (later, Jim thought he might understand; but later, really, Jim just hoped he never really had to). Jim didn't have a choice but listen to Frank yell about everything under the sun. How Jim's scores weren't high enough, how his beer wasn't cold enough, how the corn wasn't tall enough, how Sam wasn't listening, how the sun just didn't shine out anyone's ass quite bright enough. Jim didn't have a choice but listen, because when he left, and when he stopped listening, then Frank didn't have an audience at his throne (an easychair Sam said used to belong to their dad, and Jim should have chared, but "their dad" just didn't mean the same thing to him as it did to Sam, and that -- that was something else Jim didn't really have a choice about, either, wasn't it). Thing was, if they weren't before the throne for the yelling, then Frank went to them. And if Frank went to them, well -- Jim was creative, he'd always been creative, but now he was getting more creative. And maybe he was reading more action novels, and watching more fighting movies, because he had to explain the bruises. Because Frank could never find Sam (Sam was never on the farm, Sam liked to leave, and Jim could barely resent him for it), so Frank yelled at Jim. But Frank preferred the throne, and he was willing to bring Jim there, with all his alcohol-powered super-strength. So really, really, it was just better if Jim sat, beside the throne, and listened. He didn't really have a choice (or at least not much of one).

Sam walked away and never came back when Jim was ten, and Jim drove his dad's car off a cliff. Frank screamed and screamed and had Jim thrown in jail until finally Winona came back to Iowa and did two things. First, she hired Jim a shrink, and second, she divorced Frank. She explained them both to Jim with the same sentence, "Obviously, you need something different, Jimmy." Jim spent one session with the shrink, and she asked him why he'd tried to kill himself. Jim told her he hadn't. When she told him to come back when he was ready to talk, and to be honest with her, Jim walked out, and never walked back in. Winona sent Jim to live with his grandparents and boarded up the farmhouse, renting out the farmland, and Jim watched her leave. He knew that if the therapist had asked him why he'd driven the car off the cliff, he would have told her, because he had a choice. He'd been able to choose. He knew when to accelerate, when to hit the brake, how to spin the car just right, and when to jump out. He didn't have a choice but to watch his brother walk away, and he hadn't chosen to feel empty as it happened. But the car -- the car he could choose, and so he had.

Jim could never control his mother, and so he stopped trying. When he saw an opportunity to get away from Iowa -- to try something new, something that didn't reek of disappointment, and loss -- he grabbed at it. He was twelve the second time he went into space, and he had chosen it. He had chosen it, and he felt bright. He was twelve when he set foot on a colony that, only months into its inception, adopted a eugenics scheme and began mass-murdering its inhabitants. A part of Jim -- a part he had never been able to ignore, the part that told him was what right, and what was worthy -- reminded Jim that he had chosen this, and that only death had been the result. Maybe choice was a joke of the universe, then; what people told themselves they had in order to feel better about the ins-and-outs of the lives they were supposed to lead. And Jim thought, there, on Tarsus IV, in a muddy hole in the ground, avoiding starvation and extermination and whatever other death Kodos had planned for him, that maybe he should just stop choosing, and let what would happen, happen.

At fourteen, Jim graduated from high school. He finished all of his courses, because they were simple, and it was easier than continuing to sit in classrooms, day in and day out. He took entrance exams to everywhere a counselor directed him because -- well, why not? They were free, and he had nothing he had rather be doing. Fifteen schools offered him full tuition, room, and board. His counselor told him that one in Chicago was the best, and since his aptitude tests were off the charts in both linguistics and engineering, and this school excelled in both, he should accept its offer. Jim did. The counselor filled out all the paperwork, and Jim's grandparents were both still sleeping when he left. 

He graduated at seventeen with two degrees and four offers from doctoral programs. Again, he let his advisor select the school she thought was best -- her own alma mater, as it happened -- and Jim moved again, this time to Boston. Somewhere in the middle of his doctorate, he realized that he hadn't spoken to his mother in eight years, since Sam, and then he kept on working, because why did it matter? Even if he wanted to speak with her, he would need clearance, and then she would need to accept the wave. Of the many things Jim was, one was not an idiot. At eighteen, Jim wrote off his mother. He didn't really have a choice.

Riverside looked the same when Jim returned at nineteen, the newest and only Dr. Kirk, as it had when he had left at fourteen. He moved back into his grandparents' house for a few days, while the farmhouse was being aired out, and didn't tell anyone where he had been. Apparently, no one had asked, or if they had, the Kirks hadn't said. Jim didn't know what to do, without school -- without constant knowledge pouring in to cover actual thought -- and so he started doing what other nineteen-year-old men do: drinking, and picking up women. And that was easy, for him, so he did it enough to burn out the need for new knowledge, for new thought, for choice. Eventually, the alcohol made the choices for him. He remembers wondering, at one point, why he hadn't just done this from the start? Winona doesn't come back.

When he's twenty-two, he gets into a bar fight. A man dares him to do better, and Jim thinks about the last time he made a choice, about the repercussions of that. But he also thinks of all the times he's never been able to make a choice, and all the years he's been letting others make the choices for him. It's been ten years since the last time Jim Kirk made a choice, and maybe, just maybe, he's willing to try again.


End file.
